Code Of Hero: A Decision In Passing
by The Sickness
Summary: A prelude to Dinobot's final decision as displayed in "Code Of Hero". Dinobot quotes T.S. Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" when it suits him. Please review.


**Code Of Hero**

_A Decision In Passing_

  


We're never ready for the big things. The decisions that will affect our lives, and a thousand other unknowing lives. Things to come, and things that are. Decisions that may even shine light on what has been, and turn the heads of the gods to this lonely planet. If we take too long, those decisions slip away, and we find ourselves considering things that were never meant to be carried out. Such is the corruption of the world in this regard. 

  


We're never ready for the big things. Doing them makes us ready.

  


At dusk, the mountains hissed dense fog around their peaks and obscured their beauty with a veil of cloud and darkness. The sun was just a shred of half-circle above the horizon. A blood red crescent sinking slowly into an eternal night. The red was so red it was almost gold. Above it, dark violet and navy made possible the glowing of the evening stars. Two crimson glows in the night picked up their positions almost instantaneously and brushed them aside soon after. It was of no use to them. They had come to watch and listen and reflect.

  


Serenely, the mechanical monstrosity lingered on its natural surrounds, crushing under its feet the soil and life of the Earth. It would be long from now that the land would come to recognize his kind. Millions of years would pass before mankind first thrust their scrap metal into the wrongly-assumed immortality of the planet. The monster scuffed the ground with his foot and watched the gears in his ankle turn with the movement. So complex was his design. So simple it seemed against the mountains and sunset now.

  


_Because I do not hope to turn again   
Because I do not hope   
Because I do not hope to turn   
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope   
I no longer strive to strive towards such things   
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)   
Why should I mourn   
The vanished power of the usual reign?_

  


And so, in delaying patrol amongst the budding beauty of the darkened world, Dinobot found himself drawn to the natural rhythm of things. Day and night. Sunrise and sunset. Life and death. He crouched closer to the ground and ran his clawed, awkward hands through the rich topsoil, concerned with its development. Gears shifted and creaked as he raised himself up again in the new moonlight, and watched the dull color of dirt in his palm until a firm breeze swirled it into what may have been oblivion for it. He watched its path over the mountain trail until it disappeared into the shade of the sun's sleep.

  


_Because I do not hope to know again   
The infirm glory of the positive hour   
Because I do not think   
Because I know I shall not know   
The one veritable transitory power   
Because I cannot drink   
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again_

  


At that time, Dinobot was not ready for the decision, either. He was not so sure it even existed, then. Many times it had crossed his mind, and then diminished in passing, and instead of tracking its origin he would sink into the work he had to do, the things he had to complete, the things that seemed so much more important at the time. What would he do with the torture it would bring, anyway? 

  


He seemed to be running from too many enemies at once. In sleep he found himself aching for the serenity of peaceful dreaming, and yet he found only torn, grainy pictures of things he might have remembered at one time. He seemed to be running out of everything but time. His endurance was failing. More and more he became caught up in the tragedies of his tortured soul, which stood within him screaming a horrible wail that fell on deaf ears. Tempests of regret and knowledge filled his being. Traitorous infidelities to factions he never could bring himself to believe in.

  


_Because I know that time is always time   
And place is always and only place   
And what is actual is actual only for one time   
And only for one place   
I rejoice that things are as they are and   
I renounce the blessed face   
And renounce the voice   
Because I cannot hope to turn again   
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something   
Upon which to rejoice _

  


The clouds passed quickly overhead. If he strained to look high enough, he could see their direction of flight quite clearly. He wondered, when he was gone, if anyone would look at his life the same way.

  


_And pray to God to have mercy upon us   
And pray that I may forget   
These matters that with myself I too much discuss   
Too much explain   
Because I do not hope to turn again   
Let these words answer   
For what is done, not to be done again   
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us _

  


Prayers had become useless to Dinobot. They went unanswered until the very end, when no one any longer believed, when all that was left was barren wastelands of humanity and morality harboring the ruins of the merciful death of faith in anything. It occurred to him that he had allowed himself, in believing this was true, to transform into a blurry photograph of what had just been described. Another picture to add to his mental scrapbook. Something twisted inside him with such ferocity that if he had possessed the ducts for it, tears would have fallen somberly on the ground. 

  


There was little left to his will. And still he stayed alive, functional for the people he believed needed him. There were the arguments to live for. There were the orders to follow. The shame on his face was there, when in passing glances he caught the feverish looks of distrust and just barely concealed fear. They would never admit it, though. And as long as they were content to disbelieve, he would not reveal the truth about them.

  


_Because these wings are no longer wings to fly   
But merely vans to beat the air   
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry   
Smaller and dryer than the will   
Teach us to care and not to care   
Teach us to sit still_

  


The atmosphere pressed in against him like a judgmental vice. Just one more moment to look over what he soon would leave before he departed back to the world of Hell-fire he had created for himself. 

  


If Dinobot had taken just one more moment to be introspective, he would have known that the only one judging him was himself. No angel cared to tread there.

  


_Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death   
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death_

  


Lying in bed, now, staring at an unfeeling ceiling. Thoughts floating around like disowned children, crying out to be heard, and silenced with a swift threat of a worse fate. His vision was swimming, like opium smoke in his braincase, but he did not mind it much. He was beginning to see things all too clearly.

  


_At the first turning of the second stair   
I turned and saw below   
The same shape twisted on the banister   
Under the vapor in the fetid air   
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears   
The deceitful face of hope and of despair_

  


Forever had never felt so close. Reason had never seemed so desperately far and suicide had never seemed so heroic. Images danced in the worried air. Movements of such grace and fluidity that Dinobot had to squint his optics against them to block out the irregularities. Fire was in those predictions. Great, leaping flames, licking the heels of the future with forked tongues. At the mention of this, he ran his own tongue over his teeth to inspect its shape in hopes that it too had not become serpentine. All he felt was cold steel.

  


_At the second turning of the second stair   
I left them twisting, turning below;   
There were no more faces and the stair was dark  
Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth driveling, beyond repair  
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark_

  


There were no windows in his prison, he realized upon reaching over for something to hold on to. He needed neither, and soon would not miss one or the other. But as he groped for a stronghold and found nothing, Dinobot found himself disappointed in the loneliness of wisdom and prediction. His only comfort was that his precognition was only to his own fate, and not the fate of those surrounding his life. He had all their pictures in his album of the past. Upon recalling them, he knew he would miss them when he was gone.

  


_At the first turning of the third stair   
Was a slotted window bellied like the fig's fruit   
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene   
The broadbacked figure dressed in blue and green   
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute  
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown  
Lilac and brown hair;   
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair   
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair   
Climbing the third stair_

  


His sword gleamed on the rack near the wall. How tempting. How insignificant to the upcoming finale. Like all material things, it would be brushed aside and forgotten, and he would be the only thing left standing on the scorched product of reality that it so readily claimed. It would soon claim him, too, but it would be a fight to watch with awed gapings and bemused expressions littering his attached audiences. So close, and yet too late.

  


_Lord, I am not worthy _

  


The ceiling was less comforting. Soon it would be the time of mitigation. The torn and battered warrior readied himself for the sting, and slowly rose, ignoring the hopeless cries of the crows that flew overhead.

  


_Lord, I am not worthy   
but speak the word only_

  


No bed to comfort him now. Only high grass to lie in. The sun shining like a great, golden disk on his reptilian back. Against his surroundings, not so mechanical, now. More beastly than ever before. He cleared the sediment and debris on the ground behind him with a side-to-side motion of his long tail.

  


_If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent   
If the unheard, unspoken   
Word is unspoken, unheard;   
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard  
The Word without a word, the Word within   
The world and for the world;   
And the light shone in darkness and   
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled   
About the centre of the silent Word_

  


He was surprised that he was hiding not from his friends, but his former friend, now enemy. An enemy he had betrayed but once, while his friends found their hearts sinking in the light of his several betrayals and deceitful mistakes. In his head, the recollections seemed so loud. So much sound to come from a simple series of black and white polaroids.

  


_O my people, what have I done unto thee _

  


A strong wind blew from the west. With it washed along the memories, rolling to the back of his skull like lonely tumbleweeds, their weeping becoming only barely audible sobs lost in the weeds of denial. How would they look at him when he laid at their feet, suffering in final moments that he had wished for so bitterly? Through tears, or through clear stares that relayed their unanimous feeling: that he would have deserved such an end?

  


_Where shall the word be found, where will the word   
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence   
Not on the sea or on the islands, not   
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land  
For those who walk in darkness   
Both in the day time and in the night time   
The right time and the right place are not here   
No place of grace for those who avoid the face   
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice _

_Will the veiled sister pray for   
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee  
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between   
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait   
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray   
For children at the gate   
Who will not go away and cannot pray:   
Pray for those who chose and oppose _

  


Here now came the target. Dinobot raised his head slightly over the whispers of the dry, unattended grass blades. He was in the right place. There was the cavern harboring the aforementioned former friend, now enemy; soon to be ally for a very short time. He stalked the beating heart and unwitting eye with the grace of an action well-practiced. Stalked the beating heart and unwitting eye like death stalked the same of the company it chose. For this poor four-legged fool, there was none to bear witness to the perfection of the hunt. It cocked its head slightly, antlers shifting with the head, ears twitching to a sound unrecognized. The gazelle still knew nothing when it was dragged to the giant web constructed for it just outside the cave.

  


_O my people, what have I done unto thee_

  


He burrowed far below the surface of imperfect ground and covered his transformed, more-humanoid body with it, lying still like a corpse in a shallow, unmarked grave. Moments passed like decades. Time seemed to go by at a leisurely slither. For comfort, perhaps, Dinobot held his laser pistol to the ground above, threatening it to cave in as soft, eight-legged footsteps began to approach.

  


_Will the veiled sister between the slender   
Yew trees pray for those who offend her   
And are terrified and cannot surrender   
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks   
In the last desert before the last blue rocks   
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert   
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed_

  


Would they cry?

  


_O my people_

  


No more time to think of it. The former friend was his in a leap of a long awaited, well-timed coil of muscle, sinew, rod, and gear...

  


_Although I do not hope to turn again   
Although I do not hope   
Although I do not hope to turn _

  


Scorched ground, as he had predicted, blackened with the effort of many, and surviving still with the dogged pursuit of one. This was the ruined landscape where his final struggle had taken place. A weak survey proved it to be fittingly ugly. He had never realized life to be so fleeting, that in but an instant all could come to a screeching halt. Or in his case, a slow-motion, blind crash into a brick wall. He had never realized life to be so precious; had never, not for a moment, realized his life to be so meaningful to the friends surrounding him now. Dinobot saw in their eyes that death, to them, was painful. To him, the dying, it was just a tedious process in which he now felt he was rushing toward too fast.

  


_Wavering between the profit and the loss   
In this brief transit where the dreams cross   
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying   
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things   
From the wide window towards the granite shore   
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying   
Unbroken wings _

  


His back hurt. But even that was flying away from him. The burns no longer ached so. The only thing left writhing in agony was his heart, as the hand of a beloved friend thought enemy came to rest on his with a grip so loving that, had he the ducts or strength, he would have cried. He had neither.

  


_And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices   
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices   
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel   
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell   
Quickens to recover   
The cry of quail and the whirling plover   
And the blind eye creates   
The empty forms between the ivory gates   
And smell renews the salt savor of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply_

  


Perhaps he had saved the world, but it had not needed his saving, really. It would have gone on without the human race as its lover, ward, assassin. He would have liked to think, however, that the stars were smiling only for him that night, as his vision failed and his photographs began to fade. The grip on his hand was faraway. His breathing shuddered and hitched irregularly. Faces above his, concerned. A face closer, knowing that the final words would be the things that brought him through the dark times without the dying monster-angel on the ground.

  


_Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden  
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood   
Teach us to care and not to care   
Teach us to sit still   
Even among these rocks  
Our peace in His will   
And even among these rocks   
Sister, mother   
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea  
Suffer me not to be separated_

  


"The rest... is silence." 

  


_And let my cry come unto Thee..._

  


And so it was.


End file.
